Cairo - Crowds of private investors in Egypt's stock market, rallying angrily outside the bourse in downtown Cairo, demanding a halt in trading or at least the resignation of the exchange's head, have become a common sight in recent weeks.

Egypt's capital market, which for five years has been one of the best performing in the world, is now in the doldrums. The benchmark CASE 30 index has fallen by more than half since last May.

As a result, Egypt's many small retail investors, who had bet their family's savings on the seemingly inexorable rise of the CASE, are increasingly caught by the financial, social and psychological fallout of the global credit crunch.

Ordinary Egyptian families are now feeling the pain, some in desperate ways.

Last week, Ahmed Nasreddin Abdelaal, an electrical equipment salesman in his fifties and a small-time stock market investor, committed suicide after a huge loss on the exchange.

Abdelaal had saved money from years working in Kuwait, like many other Egyptians who go to work for years in Gulf Arab countries where they can earn salaries much higher than at home. He lost all of his savings in the market slump.

His wife found his body after he hung himself.

The world financial crisis currently sweeping the globe including Egypt may well claim even more victims like Abdelaal, international health experts warn.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has issued a warning saying that the crisis is likely to cause "increased mental health problems and even suicides, as people struggle to cope with poverty and unemployment."

Adding to the general crisis, many Egyptian investors' are inexperienced in dealing with the fickleness of finance and thereofore further at risk, local analysts believe.

"The main reason for the huge losses of small investors is their lack of experience in the market. They either follow the footsteps of foreigners or they trade in a spontaneous manner," Ahmed Mohamed, a stock market analyst in Cairo, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

"Not having a strategy, a vision based on detailed analysis or knowing the fundamentals of the company they are trading in, leaves the small investors in danger of losing their money," he said.

Many economies in the Middle East have become highly open and liberalized in the past decade, and growth has been rapid. Egypt's GDP growth has exceeded 6 per cent mark for several years.

As a result, enthusiasm for investments in capital markets has been high.

"Those who trade in the bourse usually have high hopes of large gains," Samia Abdel Rahman, head of the psychology department of Cairo University, said in a recent article of the state-owned al- Ahram daily.

"Dreams vary from one person to another. The expert trader will not be psychologically affected when he loses because he knows the rules of the market. But ordinary people, who usually enter the stock market in search for quick profit, get shocked," Abdel Rahman said.

"When they see their dreams shattered, depression and despair fills them, leading some to commit suicide," she added.

Abdel Rahman suggested there should be an awareness campaign to teach new investors about the rules of the market and encourage them to invest in the local trade of goods and services, a class of investments more in touch with the local economy.

The repercussions of the financial crisis, however, continue to take their toll. More cases of people who, facing financial ruin, have killed themselves have surfaced mainly in Japan and the US.

And poorer countries are evidently not immune.

In Egypt, Mohamed Atta Abdul Wahab, 45, stabbed his wife and 12- year-old daughter to death, before setting his house on fire and dying with them, after seeing his finances wiped out by market losses.

Abdul Wahab's three surviving children said that he had lost all of the "good fortune" that he had earned in six years working in the Gulf.

Nasser Loza, secretary general of Egypt's state mental health department, told dpa that "suicides have been taking place all over the world in this financial crisis. Desperate people believe that suicide is the only way out." (dpa)